THE GOOD:For almost more than a mere decade, Natsume has provided a game where it combines simulation with a bunch of assigned procedures involving Farming, Raising, and even winning the affection of a desire able girl or boy.

While it is developed on different platforms and makers, it still retains the very same aspect of Harvest Moon, only with some very fortunate changes.

The game starts of a life of a young boy who somehow gets stranded onto an island and faces a case of amnesia. Mist, one of the girls you'll get acquainted with a lot, will give you the option to name your character (by default, the boy is named Ragna)

She then convinces the character to live on her farming grounds (which also, can be named) in exchange of helping out, providing seeds, and some farming tools. Suddenly, a monster attacks the farm nearby, this is where Rune Factory is now different from Harvest Moon.

The game provides an actual "HP" and "RP" bar which differs the characters health and Rune points, or evidently, "stamina" Any action you take, whether its attacking, raising, or watering takes a small dose of your RP, if the RP is depleted, the HP meter starts to decrease. Fortunately, monsters and sometimes crop picking drops crystals to restore RP so that you can venture off the day longer. The character will also have perimeters, such as DEX, and INT to determine how useful the character becomes. Rune Spells such as Escape and Cure also benefit on either monster taming or hunting, Unfortunately the spells other than Escape ARE extremely pricey.

Be reminded, if the HP meter is depleted outside the monster cavern, the character will be in the hospital after a few game days, losing the chance to finish some objectives on that certain day. If the character loses HP in the monster cavern, you'll have to reload the last save point.

besides crop raising and hunting, the game features the very same aspects of the choice to become acquainted with a large number of bachleorettes, each with their own hobbies and likes. This will be something important to remember. It also determines the difficulty it will be so be sure to study their patterns if the job is suspected to be challenging.

THE BAD:One of the annoying aspects is the season time line, besides pausing the game, the time will keep going on even if the time is beyond 12 am. This is very important to sleep before that time or the character can face very harsh status changes that can cause him to faint and lose track of valuable days.

The very beginning puts the character very prone to get ko'ed very easily if avoiding monsters and struggling monster taming become difficult, so be sure to at least stock money for Cure before trying to focus on lumber or frequent crop harvesting.

Our thoughts on the Harvest Moon's worst problem is the common glitches and errors it can face regardless of how many years its gone by. While some have exploited and made use of the usual "wolf" traveling. Others like the Winter graphic errors and the sleeping bag can cause the game to freeze and evidently "corrupt" the data if not careful. Hopefully the English release fixes this problem.

SUMMARY:While its still a few days away before the US release is confirmed, bear in mind that if picking this game up from Asia, as mentioned above, glitches can be one of the very most problems the player can face if saving is not their frequent hobby.

depending on which tasks performed, the game can be played through from either 20-30 hours, but of course, there will always be alot of replay value to play around with as well.